Playing With Volumes: The Black and White Connaught Residence in Montreal

Connaught Residence, located in Notre Dame de Grâce, Montréal, was a dull, concrete house built in the ’50s that needed an substantial upgrade. The owners, a growing family, wanted a more spacious and contemporary home. They also mentioned that they would love to keep a certain harmony and the new design had to blend somehow with the old house’s original design line. Naturehumaine, the firm responsible with the renewal, after a careful analysis, found the solution for this problem. In order to expand the living space, the architecture firm decided to start with an extension. The intervention also consisted in re-organising the interior, to make it more comfortable and inspiring.

The house looks simple and neat, integrating playful black and white volumes. The most prominent of these is the extension itself. “The extension fills the void created by the split level of the existing house and is capped on either side with generous glazing. The living areas of the ground floor are distributed around a central core that has become the new focal point of the house. The new master bedroom found on the the second floor is secluded from the children’s bedrooms and accessed by a glass catwalk spanning the entrance of the home.”